


heaven and hell were words to me

by homesickblues



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dreams, F/M, I have feels, Post-Season 2, kastle - Freeform, share my feels, some violence but not too graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 11:25:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6327094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karen dreams in shadows and smoke. </p><p>Frank dreams in blood and sunlight. </p><p>**</p><p>Karen and Frank dream about each other, among other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heaven and hell were words to me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StellarRequiem (Ridyr)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=StellarRequiem+%28Ridyr%29).



> So you know when a ship is brand spanking new when you go to type it into the tags and ao3 doesn't even suggest it. 
> 
> I cried at least 15 times while writing this, enjoy.

Karen

 

Karen dreams in shadows and smoke.

At first, it’s quiet. Eerily so, yet her ears are ringing like after an explosion. She’s sitting in a room – maybe it’s the Nelson & Murdoch offices, maybe it’s her apartment. She isn’t sure, but she isn’t quite bothered by that fact. She’s alone, but there are shadows creeping up all four walls, made long and twisted by red light coming from somewhere outside. They make her feel like she’s surrounded by some invisible monster, and it’s slowly, _agonizingly_ slowly moving in, staking her out like prey. The shadows become opaque, tangible. She can feel the heat of them, like fire, brushing up against her ankles and shoulders. She tries to move but she _can’t_.

_Here I am, again. Damsel in distress. Karen Page screaming at demons, waiting for her savior._

She looks up and she sees Matt – no, Daredevil. He’s frowning, his lips set in a hard line. She can imagine his eyebrows are furrowed in that worried way underneath his cowl. The man behind the mask feels sorry for her; the man with the mask doesn’t seem too care all that much.

“I don’t need you to _save me_ ,” she snarls at him, trying to defiance instead of terror. “You can’t _save me_.”

She hears a noise in front of her then and turns, seeing a man with glasses and a saltwater-sweet smile gazing at her through florescent lights. His eyes are blank enough to put a poker master to shame, reflecting nothing but darkness.

“Ms. Page -” he stands, and Karen’s mind fills with white noise as her finger squeezes the trigger. It happens slowly. Much slower than it happened in real life. She sees everything with a hyper-bright realism: the blood and carnage splattering from his chest like red raindrops on pavement, the way something flickers across his cold eyes – fear, humanity, something visceral and childlike – before it vanishes into oblivion. She pulls the trigger again.

Again. Again. Six times, total. The man slumps back, his chin dropping to his chest, his lips falling slack and pale.

“STOP!” Karen screams hoarsely at herself, but she’s already done it. She goes to drop the gun, fling it away from her like poison, but when she does it slips out of her hands. She looks down to see them covered in dark, sticky blood. It oozes and drips down her wrists and arms, flowing from some invisible source. She doesn’t move to wipe it away, though. She simply watches it gush in little rivulets, blending into the veins that seem to stick out against her pale flesh.

The thing that disturbs her in a bone-deep sort of way, worse than the corpse she just created in front of her, is how she feels _nothing_. She still feels nothing as the shadows creep up the edges of the table and slide towards her now, vicious and sharp and ready to swallow her whole while she _lets them_.

“Should’ve shot him in the neck,” A voice from behind her mutters, low and gruff.

She doesn’t turn, but the shadows vanish, dissolving into wisps of dark smoke, moving up to swirl against the ceiling and around the wooden beams.

“That way,” The voice is closer now, yet not too close, “he could’ve bled out. Slowly. Had time to really think over all the lives he ruined. Could’ve had more time to suffer for what he did to you… what he _almost_ did to you…”

“I’ve never fired a gun before,” she responds hollowly, her own voice sounding distant to her ears.

“I know,” The voice answers, this time right against her ear. Her instincts tell her to jump, to turn the gun on the intrusion, to _run_ , but she stays put. His breath is hot against the skin of her neck. The shadows rush away, and the corpse vanishes, and suddenly they’re standing on the ship she saw go up in gasoline and flames at the pier.

He doesn’t touch her, but she can feel his hands hovering over her arms, close but not too close, warm but not _too_ warm.

“Frank,” she only mouths his name but he seems to hear it, reaching in front of her to take hold of her red, sticky hands. He runs his thumbs through the blood on her palms, and it doesn’t disappear but smears onto his skin as well, darker somehow.

“You’re safe,” he says softly, _so softly_ , and closes his hands around hers before sliding them slowly up her arms, smearing the red against her sallow skin.

“You’re not,” she responds, this time feeling the tears bud in the corners of her eyes. She turns then, finding him just as she expected to: deep cuts and bruises carving out the lines of his face, his eyes layered with a coldness that’s cut through by something warm, something soft. A chill runs through the entire length of her body and she can feel it settle in her gut like cold wind. She feels something familiar yet entire foreign to her. Safety, protectiveness, _trust_ … His gaze is earnest and a little sad but it isn’t belittling. He doesn’t have the look in his eyes so many people do when they look at her, like they’re looking at an abandoned puppy or a lost kid in a shopping mall. He isn’t looking at her like sad little Karen. Sad, poor Karen who can’t handle herself. Sad, poor Karen who sent six bullets into a man’s chest without hesitation.

_Sad, poor, delicate little Karen…_

The corner of his lip lifts then.

“Nah,” he says in agreement, glancing to the side in slight amusement. She follows his gaze to see Matt – now as himself with his glasses and t-shirt and jeans – staring in their direction with so much _pity_ it makes her ache somewhere deep.

“Don’t start with that catholic guilt bullshit, Red,” Frank warns under a dangerous chuckle, looking back at her and reaching up, putting his hands on either side of her face. “The Devil can’t scare me into any sort of redemption. Too late for that now.”

 _Red_. Matt had told her about that nickname with a sigh and a wistful turn toward the window, his expression reading of _pity_.

Karen feels the blood smear against her cheeks, as his palms press against her, so gently. He runs his thumb over his lips and she feels the blood there too; tastes it.

“Too late,” she whispers against his thumbs.

“Karen,” Matt says but he sounds so far away: a distant echo in an empty warehouse. “Karen, come with me. He’s dangerous.”

Karen looks into Frank’s eyes and feels the shadows creeping up again, twisting around both of them, slithering up their ankles and legs.

“You can’t save me, Matt,” she says as the shadows engulf them, swallowing them whole. “I don’t want to be saved.”

 

 

Frank

 

Frank dreams in blood and sunlight.

The sunlight’s what’s out of place. It sears angry burns into his flesh, leaving him raw. The real sun above Baghdad never scorched him quite as badly as it does now, making him dizzy, causing sweat to drip into his eyes, obscuring his view of enemy after enemy; faceless insurgents rushing at him with a battle cry. He takes them out without thinking, pumping thick American slugs into their bodies.

 _Why them_ , he asks himself.

 _They’re the bad guys_ , some voice answers from somewhere in the back of his mind. It sounds oddly like his colonel, and oddly like that bald _fuck_ he met in the slammer.

_Are they?_

A man with deep skin and bright eyes falls at his feet from one of the bullets he sends into his chest, his eyes looking up at the sky, blank but still shaded with passion and fear. Fear of death. Fear of _him_.

 _Same damn thing_ , he thinks.

The sand under the corpse morphs into clumps of chemical-green grass. The sun overhead turns softer but is somehow more piercing. Blood obscures his vision, cascading down his face from the hole in his head like some kind of fucked up fountain, spilling down onto his uniform and assault rifle.

“Daddy?” The voice comes from behind him and he wheels around. Lisa’s face hasn’t been blown off, and yet she’s pale as a ghost and dressed in purple pajamas, beautiful blonde hair done up in the messy bun her mom used to do when she was too lazy to braid it. The bodies of her mother and brother litter the ground behind her. She looks small.

_So small… my little girl…_

“Baby…” he chokes through the blood, falling to his knees in front of her.

“Daddy, can you read me the story? _Please_? Like before you left?”

“Baby, I can’t,” he says without meaning to, his mouth forming words he tries to revolt against saying, the blood filling his mouth with bitter iron. “I’m _so tired_ , baby. I’ll read to you tomorrow night. I promise.”

“Daddy, _please_.” She’s sobbing now, clutching the cardstock book to her chest. He looks up and he’s in the graveyard – the one he tries his best to avoid – and when he looks back at her she’s sinking into the ground like she’s being devoured by it. He lunges to her, trying to keep her from being pulled under, and when he hears his own voice coming from his mouth, it startles him.

“I’m so tired, baby. Tomorrow night. I promise.” He’s sobbing now too, screaming as she disappears into the earth without him. He claws at it until the skin on his fingers is ripped and painful.

He feels it, the exhaustion. The kind that seeped into his bones like a cancer the moment he stepped off the airplane he took from hell to get home that he couldn’t shake. He pants, fingers curled into clods of dirt and grass, the blood still pouring down his face.

The pulse thudding in his ears goes silent suddenly.

“My daddy’s a hero,” he hears Lisa whisper somewhere behind him. She sounds younger, and distant. “He fights bad guys so we can all be safe.”

 _Safe_.

When Frank turns he’s indoors, in an apartment he’s been to once but not well enough to notice details. The walls, then, are mostly blank, but the sun shines through the broken window and holes in the wall in a different way. It warms him in places he hasn’t been able to reach in a long time, places he’s certain no longer existed. He steps forward, glass crunching under his boots. She’s standing by the window, the sunlight making the strawberry blonde hair around her head look like a halo. When she looks back at him, there’s something of a smile on her face, but her eyes are melancholy, careful...

“I think they’re gone,” she says, turning back toward the light. “I think I scared them off.” He can hear the smile in her voice.

He’s silent for a moment, watching as she pushes herself away from the window frame and walks toward him.

“I can’t find her,” he manages to spit out, looking back at the now-carpeted ground under him. She follows his eyesight and frowns, stepping forward to place her hands on either side of his face. The blood’s gone. “Dammit,” he says again, feeling the sobs building in his chest. “ _Dammit_ , I can’t _find her_ …”

She brushes her thumb against his cheekbone. He flinches, unaccustomed to the smoothness of her skin, the way she feels so warm and touches him so gently.

“You won’t find her, Frank,” she says with intensity in her pale eyes, boring them straight into the soul he isn’t sure he still has. “And I’m so sorry. You’ll never be able to stop looking for her. But we find other things in life to make up for the things we’ve lost…”

With a shaky hand he traces the line of her smooth, lean arm with his fingertips, finding her hand and placing his own over hers. The sunlight fades from her hair and when he takes his eyes off of her, they’re in a dark room. There’s shouting outside, and someone trying to break down the door. Frank shakes his head and backs away from her, pulling her hands from his face.

“You need to leave,” he says in a rushed voice, patting his hands down his sides in search of any sort of weapon.

“I’m not leaving you,” she speaks with a fiery intensity that resonates deep within him, pulling at something he can’t name, but he pushes past it, panicked.

“You need to _leave_ ,” he snarls, even though it’s impossible, since the only way out is through the door that some unknown enemy is currently trying to tear through to, most likely, fill him with lead and steel.

But not her.

 _Not her_ , _god fucking dammit. You can’t take her._

The yelling outside grows louder. He clenches his fists by his side, ready to shatter skulls, ready to rip the life out of whoever comes near her.

“You can’t save me, Frank.” She takes another step closer to him, her teeth clenched defiantly, her eyes ablaze. “Let me save _you_.”

He notices then that though she is soft, she’s rough too. She’s a hurricane disguised as a summer breeze. 

He reaches out to touch her, then. Any part of her. Her hand, her hair, her lips… he wants to learn how she feels under his calloused fingers, memorize the contours of her body, the texture of her skin. The door crashes open. He looks back and she’s gone, the space she used to fill replaced with dead, soggy air. When he falls, he finds nothing but sand.

“Karen Page.” he says her name just to prove he knows it, just to prove she’s real and he hasn’t just imagined her. Rivulets of blood pave tiny canyons below him, coming at him from all directions. He hears her voice whispered into his ear, the words she’d written into the paper, the words he knew, somehow, were directed straight to him.

“ _Look into your own eyes and tell me you’re not heroic. That you’ve not endured, or suffered, or lost the things you care about most. And yet… here you are_.”

 _Here I am_.

Everything fades into shades of yellow, shades of warm.

Nothing but sand.

_And her._

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: ophiliad.tumblr.com come cry with me about kastle
> 
> title comes from the hozier song "work song". i'm fairly convinced that entire album was written as a premonition about kastle. give it a listen
> 
> also i really want comments come talk to me


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